Aim. To analyze representation of silence as a key detail in the psychological portrait of the main character in N. S. Leskov’s story “The Life of a Woman.”

Methodology. The study used methods of discourse and contextual analysis, the method of studying dictionary definitions, and the descriptive-analytical method.

Results. The study concluded that the representation of silence as an essential component of nonverbal behavior in various discursive situations is a key detail in creating the psychological portrait of the protagonist of “The Life of a Woman.” It is silence, both involuntary and symptomatic, and intentional and semiotic, that conveys the most complex nuances of Nastya Prokudina’s mental state and her communicative intentions.

Research implications. The results of the article can be used to solve similar research problems.

Aim. To identify the linguistic and stylistic features of N. S. Leskov’s idiostyle based on his early journalistic work “Note on Buildings” and to determine the system-forming techniques in the context of journalistic discourse.

Methodology. The study is based on a comprehensive linguistic and stylistic analysis of the text, including lexical-semantic analysis (identifying thematic groups of vocabulary, analyzing metaphors and epithets), and contextual analysis of irony and sarcasm. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the oppositions “high / low”, “abstract / physiological,” and “official / everyday” as the basis of the author’s style.

Results. It has been revealed that the system-forming technique of Leskov’s idiostyle in “A Note on Buildings” is contrast, which is implemented at all levels of the text. A consistent collision of elevated abstract vocabulary with physiological vocabulary has been identified, which creates an estrangement effect and reveals the conflict between official magnificence and the real conditions of life. Key author’s metaphors and epithets, which conceptualize the criticism of the bureaucratic system and social indifference, have been analyzed. The article provides evidence that irony and sarcasm serve as an expressive and an analytical function in the text, allowing the author to reveal deep contradictions of contemporary reality through tragicomic grotesque.

Research implications. The article deepens our understanding of the nature of N. S. Leskov’s idiostyle, demonstrating the unity of artistic and journalistic techniques in his works and identifying the role of contrast as a tool for social analysis in 19^th century journalistic discourse. The findings of the study can be used in university courses on the history of 19^th century Russian literature, text linguistics, special courses on N. S. Leskov’s works, and in the analysis of journalistic texts.

Aim. To determine how the Russian writers arrange and use antonymic constructions in their texts to represent the living and working conditions of Russian craftsmen (based on the stories “The LeftHander” by N. S. Leskov and “Ivanko Krylanko” by P. P. Bazhov).

Methodology. The study was focused on the speech material from the stories “The Left-Hander” by N. S. Leskov and “Ivanko Krylanko” by P. P. Bazhov. The methods used in the collection and study of the material were observation, sampling, comparative analysis, and the method of differentiation of values and interpretation.

Results. The analysis showed that both lexemes and antonymic paradigms act as key units in the tales of Russian writers N. S. Leskov and P. P. Bazhov. Antitheticality includes an extralinguistic component as a mandatory feature. Russian writers expand the area of antonymy by using synonymous paradigms and units that do not involve integral semantic components.

Research implications. The research results contribute to the description of the category of opposition and can be used in the study of works written by other writers.

Aim. To identify and analyze the ideological and aesthetic role of the means of representing the image of the mother in Nikolai Leskov’s novel “The Life of a Peasant Woman.”

Methodology. The article uses the analysis of lexical and phraseological means to examine how N. S. Leskov presented the characteristics of the Russian peasant woman of the 19^th century as a mother in his novel “The Life of a Peasant Woman.” The article evaluates Leskov’s multifaceted approach to the resources of artistic representation of the truthful image of a mother, which make it possible to discuss the author’s conceptualization of the concept of “mother” in the peasant serf family of the 19^th century. The study employs methods of observation, description, analysis, continuous and targeted sampling of linguistic means, as well as lexicographic and contextual-stylistic analysis.

Results. It is shown that, using purposefully selected linguistic means, the heroine of the story, Mavra Petrovna, is depicted by N. S. Leskov as a hardworking and caring woman who can have good feelings with both her tyrannical husband, and her daughter, although her role in her daughter’s life was insignificant since she was powerless to influence Nastya’s fate or prevent the tragedy. The writer does not use any explicit or implicit language with the semantics of ‘happiness’, instead focusing on words with the semantics of ‘patience’ and ‘emotion’. The difficult fate of the Russian woman-mother becomes clear to readers thanks to the means of predication that N. S. Leskov used to create his character. This confirms the significance of the identified resources for representing the author’s implicit evaluative position.

Research implications. The results of the work can be used in the preparation of lectures and practical classes on linguo-culturology and the language of fiction in universities, including those in China. The study expands our understanding of the role of predication in revealing the character’s image and identifying the author’s assessment.

Aim. To consider the problem of the linguacultural approach to the work of N. S. Leskov as a writer of “blameless conscience.” An analysis of Leskov’s unique “characters” is conducted in terms of archetype, stereotype, and symbol within the context of the linguo-axiological field of scholarship.

Methodology. The article utilized methods of linguacultural analysis, componential semantic analysis, linguo-cognitive analysis, linguo-stylistic analysis of the speech canvas of a prose text, pragma-stylistic analysis of the word-sign, and interpretive analysis.

Results. The writer’s creative worldview is defined through the prism of their value system, reflected by axiologemes which are concepts of a linguo-cultureme. This linguo-cultureme constructs a paradoxical picture of the character’s personality within the space of Leskov’s fictional world (Musk Ox (Vasily Bogoslovsky) and Odnodum (Alexander Ryzhov)). The paradigm of axiological signs, that are pragmemes and connotationsms, is unified by the object of evaluation, that is the story’s character, and is accompanied by an evaluation format that is embodied by attributive-predicative characteristics. Based on Leskov’s position that “man lives by words,” the article’s verbal means is the “voice” of the character, the narrator, and members of society. The polyphony of these “voices” reflects cultural “polyphony” and thus constructs the axiological “framework” of the “Leskov hero,” who bears the enigma of a “positive” character despite the negative actions depicted by the author. This enigma is resolved by a unique linguacultural portrait of the characters, reflecting the spiritual quest of an ethnic group in its archetypal, symbolic, and stereotypical nature. The meaning of “persistent” and “obstinate” seeker, searching for a “path,” suffering from “faith” and “unbelief,” is unusual for the chosen names (Musk Ox and Odnodum), and this makes it possible to see a very unordinary path of “hatred” toward the rich and the inept agitation of the poor. Filled with multilayered meaning, axiological culturemes (like blazhnoi (‘fool’), chudak (‘eccentric’), etc.) not only allow us to appreciate the originality and strangeness of the “bedonosetc” (‘poor bearer’) and “obnishevanetc” (‘impoverished’) (we use these precedents for characterization) but also to see the character’s linguistic worldview, in which both the revolutionary path and the revolution itself are “read” in the semantic structure of words within the linguistic genius of the Russian writer.

Research implications. The specificity of linguistic images of personality that define its archetype, stereotype, and symbol, as well as its expressive language as the cultural code of the nation and its great writer as a “magician” of language was described through the drawing on the theory of linguo-culture and its unit, that is linguo-cultureme, in an axiological context, and a componential semantic analysis of words, more precisely the “voices” of characters in their polyphonic reality, and a modern linguostylistic approach to text. An attempt is made to provide a contemporary linguo-cultural interpretation of N. S. Leskov’s artistic world.

Aim. To highlight the phenomenon of “Gothic” features in the historical and literary concepts of V. F. Odoevsky and N. S. Leskov by comparing the Gothic elements of the chronotope in the story “The Salamander” (1841) and the story “The Ghost of the Engineering Castle” (1882); a “strange” (“scary”) house is considered as the said chronotope as a result of the transformation of the image of the “Gothic castle” taking into account the life-like literary strategy of the second half of the 19^th century.

Methodology. The analysis presented in this article is based on the principles of historical-genetic and comparative-typological analysis of literary works. The characterization of the text’s key elements, comparable to the traditions of the Gothic novel as a literary-polemic and metatextual phenomenon, is conducted using elements of the structural-semiotic method, as well as elements of cultural semiotics.

Results. Stable elements of the Gothic novel’s poetics persisted in individual works of the mid – to late 19^th century, becoming a “second order” historical and literary reality in the context of the new era. For both V. F. Odoevsky and N. S. Leskov, elements of “fear” and narrative intrigue provide a unique structure, shaping the ideological problem of the “meeting” of two principles: the real and the mystical, the present and the past, the energetic and the devoid of it, the rational and the irrational. Thus, the duality of the worldview, genetically rooted in the Gothic genre tradition, made it possible to use this tradition as the subject of artistic interpretation, incorporated into a complex system of dialogue between author and reader, and, in general, realized the movement toward a philosophical and historical understanding of the 18^th century as a distinctive cultural era, significant for the development of historicism within the ideological system of the 19^th century.

Research implications. The results of the study can be the basis for considering the historical and literary concept of V. F. Odoevsky and N. S. Leskov in general, as well as studying the concept of literary play, the motifs of the Gothic novel in the literature of the second half of the 19^th century.